The manuscript of Septimius: revisiting the scene of Hawthorne's "failure".(evaluation of writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life)(Critical essay)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life (1872) is habitually considered a failure today, valuable only as the pathetic documentation of the rapid decline of the creative capacity of one of America's greatest writers. Biographer after biographer has ventured to portray this mental "crack-up" in increasingly loud colors, and critics have in the main followed Henry James's recommendation that we purposely reserve but a small space for speaking of the book, "for the part of discretion seems to be to pass it by lightly." Dismissing Hawthorne's posthumous romance as an "essentially crude piece of work" (162), James's advice apparently has been taken to heart by American critics: over the subsequent 150 years, Septimius has been passed by so lightly that one can to date find only one substantial reading of the whole text) Yet when the romance was originally published in 1872, edited by Una Hawthorne with some assistance from the poet Robert Browning, it was favorably, even enthusiastically, received. Despite its unfinished state, the reviewer of the London limes, for instance, did not hesitate to compare it to Hawthorne's "masterpiece, Transformation, or The Marble Faun." Indeed, while this reviewer held that some elements of the supernatural "might have been toned down," he or she did not find that its incompleteness was such that it detracted significantly from the reading experience:

 
   unfinished, extravagant, and mournful as it is, it has a 
   fascination about it that leads you on from scene to scene, 
   dreading yet almost longing to be shocked or surprised again. You 
   feel you are following the workings of, perhaps, the most original 
   mind of his generation, refining with its innate poetry the strange 
   births of a capricious and almost sinister fancy. Reflection is 
   piqued and excited throughout. Hardly a page but has its startling 
   suggestion subtly argued, or advanced incidentally in the course of 
   conversation. 

In short, "it is a remarkable book," one which "will do no injustice to the author's memory." Though hardly destined to rank among the author's more popular works, "it will be read for its poetry and fancy by many who care but little for fiction in general, and on those who really appreciate and admire it we can hardly doubt it will exercise a strong and growing fascination" (5). (2)

History would quickly disprove this prophecy; James's condemnatory view was a mere five years in waiting and has since been almost unanimously upheld. But the review makes evident that, notwithstanding its unfinished state, Septimius is quite capable of generating a mode of response that is at once intellectually intense and highly pleasurable. One might have thought that the 1977 publication of volume 13 of the Centenary Edition, which collected the various documents that make up the romance as The Elixir of Life Manuscripts and thus finally brought Septimius to light in all its ragged glory, would have sparked renewed critical interest in Hawthorne's last phase; but with the significant exception of Charles Swann's study, criticism on the romance has remained as scarce as ever.

The reasons behind Septimius's continued exclusion are complex and multifaceted and would no doubt provide as rich a source for studying the mechanics of canonization as some of Hawthorne's other works (the pivotal texts in this respect are Tompkins and Brodhead). In the present essay, however, I will confine myself to considering the extent to which the Centenary Edition (CE) might paradoxically have contributed to perpetuating Septimius's status as a "failure." It is historical irony that the one critic who has done the most to bring the unfinished romances to light is also heavily responsible for stigmatizing them as unfinished, if not unreadable. Edward H. Davidson, who was on the editorial board of CE Volumes 12 and 13, first presented his view of the unfinished romances in Hawthorne's Last Phase (1949). Fifteen years later, his contribution to Hawthorne Centenary Essays effectively cemented the notion that the unfinished romances manifest "Hawthorne's artistic collapse" ("Unfinished" 163) although he had remarkably little to say of Septimius, "the fragments" of which, he claimed, "reveal a distressing improvisation with almost palpably felt ideas" (158). Davidson states categorically that "[W] hen [Hawthorne] finally put aside the large pile of manuscript later to be known as Septimius Felton, he had written many thousands of words and had accomplished nothing" (144), but one cannot but surmise that Davidson failed properly to differentiate the American Claimant materials from the much more nearly finished Septimius romance. He notably devoted most of his work to the American claimant manuscripts, bringing out an edition of Hawthorne's Dr Grimshawe's Secret in 1954.

It is thus hardly surprising that James's verdict of Septimius as a failure informs the commentary to volume 13 of the Centenary Edition that Davidson and his co-editor, Claude M. Simpson provide, albeit in a milder form. Indeed, the editorial work on this volume, while something of a philological wonder, arguably remains in the grip of the prejudiced notion that Hawthorne's unfinished works lack any value but that of providing us with a glimpse of the artist's workshop; Davidson and Simpson's work could be said to have inadvertently ensured that Septimius remains excluded from the Hawthorne legacy. This exclusion is evident already in the decision to include "The Dolliver Romance," Hawthorne's last effort at imaginative writing, under a joint rubric with the romance about Septimius, therefore unfortunately consolidating the myth that these two quite distinct projects mark the groping and unsuccessful stages in an attempt to write a single romance about an elixir of life. (3) For the Centenary editors in 1976, it would seem, as for James in 1879, Septimius is "essentially crude piece of work" (James 162).

The story of the composition of Septimius, as told by the Centenary editors, runs as follows: Hawthorne had sketched the outline of the story to his publisher James T. Fields by mid-September 1861 (Simpson and Davidson 561), and when work commenced, it initially proceeded much more easily than had work on the American Claimant romance. Hawthorne successively sketched the plot in eight Studies and then turned out "Septimius Felton," a first version of the complete romance of just under two hundred pages (in the Centenary Edition's spacious typesetting). He then undertook a fairly detailed outline of the romance in its entirety, referred to as a Scenario by the editors of CE 13, which breaks the romance down into fifteen individual scenes. When this Scenario was to be turned into a final product, Hawthorne's literary faculty again unaccountably broke down, and he was only able to bring the revision, called "Septimius Norton" in CE 13, up to about two-thirds of the story as drafted in "Felton" even though it is more than 250 pages long. It is impossible to say exactly when Hawthorne stopped working on Septimius, but since he produced the essays for Our Old Home in 1862, it would seem that what he did achieve of Septimius was the result of a relatively short-lived creative outburst that he was unable to sustain beyond the first half of 1862. At any rate, once the final essays for Our Old Home were finished, Hawthorne turned his attention to "The Dolliver Romance" sometime between July and September 1863, but it is possible that he had abandoned the Septimius romance long before that finally realizing, perhaps, that his creative powers had long since deserted him (Simpson and Davidson 557-72).